IT WOULD be very cruel to suggest that Jeremy Corbyn’s late conversion to Britain being members of a customs union with the EU post-Brexit was motivated by crude politicking.
Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, Barry Gardiner, has spent most of the last twelve months echoing the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ line and rejecting any form of customs union.
If Mr Gardiner was disappointed by his leader’s very public rejection of what he had every reason to believe was Mr Corbyn’s preferred policy he had every reason to be. Especially as he now has to sell the brave new policy to the media.
Writing in The Guardian last year, Barry Gardiner said: ”Some have suggested we should retain membership of the customs union, the benefits of which extend to goods rather than services, and establish common import tariffs with respect to the rest of the world. But that is not possible.”
He continued: ”Other countries such as Turkey have a separate customs union agreement with the EU. If we were to have a similar agreement, several things would follow: the EU’s 27 members would set the common tariffs and Britain would have no say in how they were set. We would be unable to enter into any separate bilateral free trade agreement. We would be obliged to align our regulatory regime with the EU in all areas covered by the union, without any say in the rules we had to adopt. And we would be bound by the case law of the ECJ, even though we would have no power to bring a case to the court.”
In other words, Mr Gardiner believes – or at least he believed then, or perhaps he believed his leader believed, or hoped against hope someone somewhere believed – that membership of a customs union was a non-starter.
He crystallised that sentiment in one pithy phrase: ‘The 52% who voted to leave the EU would consider it a con if Britain was out of Europe but still subservient to its laws and institutions’.
What a difference six months make.
On Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn said: “We have long argued that a customs union is a viable option for the final deal. So Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe.”
Mr Gardiner, a genial-looking chap, must have remarkable self-control not to jump up from his seat and bellow, “You what?!”
So, now we have a sort of clear sort of policy placed before the public as an alternative to the Conservatives’ vision for Brexit. Whatever that is.
In fact, Mr Corbyn’s speechwriters came up with a very nice line on the chaos within Conservative ranks: “Time after time with this government, anything agreed at breakfast is being briefed against by lunch and abandoned by teatime.”
However, it is now poor Barry Gardiner who must explain Labour’s long teatime of the soul on a customs union. Genial though he appears, Mr Gardiner’s patience is about to sorely tested.
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